Shayne Looper: On monsters, sanity, and the disturbing residence of evil

Shayne Looper

Monday

Sep 29, 2008 at 12:01 AMSep 29, 2008 at 2:58 AM

But the frightening truth is that evil is not embodied in monsters, but in people; ordinary people, people who hold down jobs and worry about money. People with names like Adolf, certainly, but also with names like Tom and Mary – or Shayne.

He did not stand out in high school. In fact, he dropped out. I imagine him as a smart kid who lacked athletic ability. Perhaps he was unusually shy. For whatever reason, he did not like school and chose not to stay.

There were not many options open to a high school dropout in that slow economy. He tried mechanic work, but that was not a good fit. He went to work for his father. That lasted for two years. Then he tried sales, first as a clerk, then as a district agent for a subsidiary of Standard Oil. He did better this time, and stuck with it for six years.

He married a girl named Veronica and they started a family. On the advice of a friend, he joined a political party, thinking that it might be helpful to his career. It was.

A job soon opened up for him in transportation, the industry in which he worked the rest of his life.

When the country began moving toward war, he decided to join the military; not, he said, because he was idealistic, but because the thought it would look good on his resume.

He rose, though not rapidly, through the ranks, and was eventually promoted to "transportation administrator." His administrative ability, coupled with a knack for managing complex logistical issues, won him a position with better benefits and higher pay. In this regard, his story is similar to that of a million other young men and women, trying to find their place in the world.

His name was Otto Adolf Eichmann, and he was the transportation administrator of "The Final Solution to the Jewish Question." He personally managed the logistics of transporting untold numbers of Jews to Nazi death camps in Poland.

Yet, when Eichmann looked in the mirror he saw only a principled and hard-working mid-level administrator.

Principled? Eichmann was a monster, possessing a work ethic but not a conscience. He hardly blinked an eye as he sent men, women and children to their deaths.

Transporting Jews to death camps was for him a job, like transporting parts to a factory. If he had trouble sleeping at night it was because of cost overruns and delays, not ethical questions about genocide.

But was Eichmann a monster? According to reports, he displayed no antisemitism. Psychological evaluations did not reveal any psychopathic tendencies. He seemed an ordinary enough guy, who always claimed that he was just following orders.

At his trial in Jerusalem in 1962, Eichmann told the jury that he only joined the SS in the hopes of advancing his career.

The political philosopher Hannah Arendt, herself a German of Jewish descent, coined the phrase "the banality of evil" in regards to Eichmann. Her controversial report on his trial for "The New Yorker" incited angry responses from men and women around the world. They were sure that Eichmann was a demon, and were outraged that Arendt only described him as a man.

Those people expected Eichmann to be rabid and insane. They wanted – they needed – to see him as the embodiment of pure evil.

But the frightening truth is that evil is not embodied in monsters, but in people; ordinary people, people who hold down jobs and worry about money. People with names like Adolf, certainly, but also with names like Tom and Mary – or Shayne.

Thomas Merton once wrote that it is "the sanity of Eichmann [that] is disturbing." Disturbing because it raises the possibility that evil is not out there, but in here, in the human heart. Dallas Willard agrees: "The magnitude of evil done is a reflection of circumstances that have capitalized on the commonplace habits of human beings in those circumstances."

If Willard is right, then we must make sure that when circumstances capitalize on our commonplace habits, we are led to do good, not evil. This requires a kind of conversion, which only God has the skill to perform; a conversion Jesus once described as being "born again."

Shayne Looper's column appears in The Daily Reporter. He is the pastor at Lockwood Community Church in Coldwater, Mich.

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